Tech companies that retain their engineers best

LaunchDarkly is doing bold new things to ensure our employees are engaged.

More than half of our first 20 employees, like Alexis Georges, are still with us. Our commitment to living our values not only makes us stronger as a company, but it also makes LaunchDarkly a place where people genuinely love working. Here’s what a few of our teammates have to say:

“My favorite company value is 'build together, win together.' The way in which everyone supports each other, whether for a work project or because they need to take time off, makes it a safe place to be open about what you need and when you need help. It’s great to watch people step up and offer help or to cover for people." – Cameron Savage, a Product Manager who has worked at LaunchDarkly since 2019. This culture of care is also demonstrative of our company value: "work impactfully, work sustainably."

"There are many opportunities to try new things based on what you’re interested in, demonstrating our value ‘learn and grow.’ My managers have been flexible in giving me the opportunities I’ve asked for to learn or try something new, allow space to make and learn from mistakes, and are open to internal mobility and joining different teams. I was impressed by what I learned during the interview process about working at LaunchDarkly, and I’ve found that my experience has lived up to my expectations!” – Shia Liu, a Software Engineer who started in April of 2022.

When the pandemic first arrived, we adapted quickly, transitioning to a remote-first company and creating new best practices to support team members during this difficult time. We added benefits such as a home-office stipend, and changed how we worked together to ensure that everyone had the resources they needed to get their jobs done effectively. We continue to invest in collaborating closely, even though we are physically distant. For instance, the Galaxia Latinx ERG (Employee Resource Group), whose gatherings are open to anyone like all of our employee resource groups, hosted a fun empanada making class for Latinx/Hispanic heritage month where several dozen employees across the company were sent the ingredients to their homes and followed a live class hosted by a professional chef. At the end, people posted photos of their end-products on Slack and celebrated their shared experience.

It has paid off. Our business and team continues to grow. We hired over 40 new Product Delivery teammates in 2022 and are still expanding. You can learn more about our high-performing team here.

The average tenure at Carbon Five is 5 years.

All of the partners have been here for 11 or more years. There is a big difference between having a product-type versus a consulting-type of involvement at a company. Some people want to have ownership in a product over many years, and potentially move up in title and in a hierarchy. However, for us on the consulting side, we love learning, leveling up our skills, and enjoy doing it quickly. You might go from doing data-warehousing work with Java to building a platform with Node to developing in React Native for a mobile application. People who like diving into different domains and code flourish here.

Each year, we provide our team members with an annual professional development budget of $2,000 to attend conferences, complete certifications, and enroll in classes or other training relevant to their field. If working on new things every 4-6 months with a senior team appeals to you, we’d love to hear from you. (Note: we usually hire about one associate engineer per year per office.)

At ReadMe, you’re a full person. Not just an engineer.

On the engineering team, nobody has left in the past four years. What’s more, everyone who was hired since the start of 2020 is still at ReadMe. Our Head of Product, Marc, was our first engineer and has been here for more than six years. Over the pandemic we’ve made efforts to support the mental health and overall well-being of employees, and stay connected and collaborative in a hybrid way.

Our Head of Engineering, Rafe, has been here for almost three years. As he puts it, “ReadMe rewards creativity, and provides space to work on complex problems with incredible people.” Kanad, our Developer Advocate, has been here for almost four years. He says, “The biggest thing [that’s kept me at ReadMe] is the variety of experiences I’ve had, and the ability to explore my web development interests as they’ve evolved over time.”

Emily, an Enterprise Engineer, has been here for two years. As she explains, “What I love about ReadMe is the people – both on the engineering team and company-wide. There’s a strong culture of caring about people, work/life balance, and good perks. Within the engineering team there’s a lot of flexibility and adaptability – the way we scope out work and deadlines is fluid, allowing for a manageable workload. From what I've seen, everyone on the team is respected and given autonomy over their work. People are also allowed to make mistakes without blame or shame. It’s a welcoming, friendly, collaborative environment.”

Qualia is a place to build careers.

We’re a close-knit team, and many of our engineers have been at Qualia from the beginning. Since our founding in 2015, most engineers have remained on the team, and of those few that left, several decided to return.

As we continue to grow, our aim is to ensure that everyone at Qualia feels, above all, excited to be a part of the team. We’ve made a commitment to maintain our vibrant culture while continuing to improve our employee experience as the company scales. In addition to offering comprehensive health benefits (learn more about our benefits below under Work/Life Balance!), we’ve developed a robust onboarding program for new hires, professional development opportunities, and we’re actively involved in community-focused volunteering. When the COVID-19 shelter-in-place order transitioned Qualia to work-from-home, we placed an even greater emphasis on keeping employees engaged through biweekly all-hands meetings, virtual events, and team bondings (online cooking classes and trivia are recent examples!).

We hire artists, not assassins.

High employee retention is more about value alignment than anything else. Our goal from day one is to work with people who share our values and understand why we’re building what we’re building on a deeply personal level. We sometimes joke that we’re a home for the crazies, where creative and passionate people thrive!

We are all artists in our own way, driven by our love of the product, team, and mission. Our first hire, Tom, has a deep seeded passion for security and privacy. (He reads privacy policies the way most people watch Netflix, no joke.) For Tom, it is not a task, but a way of life, and we appreciate how he brings that passion to our team. Yasmine recently joined the marketing team with an exciting focus on ramping up developer adoption among our fast growing user base. Ruud joined us from Instagram, where he led their API backend infrastructure. Their interests and enthusiasm is contagious. As a last example, Ryan owns developer advocacy at Doppler. His love for building communities helps us stay connected to and inspired by our users.

While passion remains our main driver, we also have some pretty great benefits. In addition to paid family leave (for all new parents regardless of gender), we also support people who might need help growing their families with fertility treatment benefits. We conduct regular compensation reviews in order to make sure everyone is paid competitively and equally and also a dedicated wealth advisor. As part of onboarding, new hires can take advantage of an hour-long session to understand their equity compensation package, how they can best plan their actions, and more.

If you ask team members why they love working at Karat, you’ll likely hear it’s because of the people.

Everyone here is working for one common goal and leaves their ego at the door. “I’ve never worked with a group of more motivated, mission-driven people,” says Jason. Despite onboarding and working remotely, the team is proactive about maintaining a sense of closeness and building a cohesive culture, says Cynthia. For those who are interested, the engineering team holds regular social hours (think playing different board games), Zoom lunches 2-3 days a week, as well as a weekly book club discussion (about different articles or books) on Fridays.

It’s this extremely collaborative, supportive environment that Elayne credits for helping her decide whether to move into a people management role. “I don’t think I would have taken a management position at any other company. It’s because I have such a high degree of trust in everyone on the team [at Karat] that I decided to become a manager.” The opportunity to learn and grow is abundant as we tackle real-world problems, so it’s an exciting time to join the team!

Our average tenure for engineers is three years and all four founders have been here since the beginning.

We invest in our people and want to see them succeed. One main way we do this is with a career action plan, where team members can share what interests them, what skills they’d like to develop, and where they see themselves in five or 10 years. From there, managers help create daily, weekly, monthly, and quarterly goals to check in on. This dedication to professional growth speaks for itself – our retention rates exceed the industry average and our turnover rate was 11% in 2021 and 3% YTD.

Here’s what four of our software engineers have to say about why they love working at Ladder:

“Life insurance is a fundamentally good product, a net positive for the world. It’s awesome to know that everything we do translates into more families being protected.” – Guilherme

“Ladder has an open and supportive culture that fosters healthy discussion and promotes growth from our mistakes.” – Bobby

“Ladder does a great job taking care of its employees and making Ladder a fun place to work. Whether it’s a Ladder Olympics planned by the #fun-committee or making sure we have a ping pong table in the kitchen, it’s fun to come into the office!” – Chris

“As an engineer at Ladder, I work in an environment where I can grow professionally and contribute to the team while also enjoying work and having fun. The blameless culture set from the top-down makes this possible.” – Andrew

We enjoy working and growing together!

As our team has steadily grown during the pandemic years, we’ve maintained a close-knit, collaborative, and fun community! Although Propel didn’t originally start as a remote-first company, we quickly learned how to adapt to this new way of working.

While we’ve a thriving and interactive team culture on Slack and Zoom, we still make the time to meet in-person at team and company-wide retreats and events. In March 2022, we had a karaoke night near our Brooklyn office after celebrating our Series B announcement!

Some members of our engineering team would like to share their favorite part of working at Propel:

• Jonathan: “Probably the people. Everyone here seems to really care about what we are doing and care about helping others grow and succeed.”
• Ruthie: “Propel is a deeply empathetic, people-first company, both in regard to our users and our co-workers. I get to work on something incredibly meaningful with teammates I enjoy spending time with and learn a lot from.”
• Mohan: “I love having agency over what I work on, which I really didn’t experience before Propel. Being able to write proposals and having some influence over what I spend six weeks of my life on is so nice.”
• Charles: “I love everyone I work with – I get to learn and improve through every interaction.”

It’s also important to mention that since our founding in 2014, we’ve had only three IC members on our engineering team leave. (In July 2021, one of them went on to pursue building their startup, and we hope they’re doing great!) So if joining a fun, collaborative, mission-driven team speaks to you, we look forward to hearing from you!